Mary Tyrone casts a long shadow over “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” while she’s onstage, and while she’s not. For much of the second act, this morphine-addicted mother haunts her husband and sons with her absence. They know that once she disappears up the stairs of their ramshackle summerhouse, she is finding a vein, getting a fix and slipping away. Meanwhile, as soon as Mary steps offstage, the actress Lesley Manville has shaken off the character and started taking care of business. She spends her long break, before returning for Mary’s final dope-fueled monologue, getting her own life in order: taking a shower, doing a bit of sewing, answering emails.

“I hope that doesn’t destroy the illusion,” Ms. Manville told me the morning after her American debut in the Eugene O’Neill play, which has arrived in New York after runs in London and Bristol. (It will be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater through May 27.)

Onstage the night before, Ms. Manville’s hands were instruments of Mary’s pain, fiddling restlessly, wringing each other red, scratching at her neck and plinking madly at the piano. Now they were sheathed in a kind of delicate armor — a collection of intricate metallic rings, a gold watch, a slim Tiffany bracelet inscribed with her initials — and cupped around a mug of hot water with lemon. The idea of that character managing to consume this woman was suddenly ludicrous. “You’re imagining I’m sitting in my dressing room,” she said with a laugh, “pretending to shoot up!”

No, Lesley Manville doesn’t waste her time sitting around in the dark. She’s been acting since she was 16. She has things to do, lines to learn, lemon water to drink. Even her Mary Tyrone is sped up, the energy of her performance helping to pace the play at an efficient 3 hours 20 minutes, intermission included. Lately she has been at work filling out a corner of the human experience that is still too rarely depicted on film — that of women her age, which at the moment is 62.

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As Mary Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey,” Ms. Manville plays a wife whose ambitions have been extinguished by her husband, James (Jeremy Irons).

CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

She just earned her first Oscar nomination for her turn as Cyril Woodcock, the sharp-as-a-sewing-needle older sister to Daniel Day-Lewis’s precious dressmaker Reynolds in “Phantom Thread” (2017), but she has been reliably dazzling in the corners of films for years. As the 19th-century scientist Mary Somerville in Mike Leigh’s film “Mr. Turner” (2014), she crackles with the energy of scientific discovery; as the desperately lonely secretary Mary in Mr. Leigh’s “Another Year” (2010), she appears almost in stop-motion as she jitters across the screen, downing glasses of white wine and spitting out deflections.

Lately Ms. Manville has sparkled on television, too, where she currently appears as the endlessly patient widow Cathy in the BBC’s tender sitcom “Mum” and as the sadistic madam Lydia Quigley in Hulu’s 18th-century drama “Harlots.” She recently squeezed in shooting the second season of “Harlots” during the day while performing “Long Day’s Journey” in London at night, so she used her second-act break to learn her next morning’s lines.

This is too much work for one person, but she is unfazed. “It had to be done,” she said. “I am unbelievably pragmatic. There’s no point in me going” — she affected a childlike whine — “Oh, I’m too tired! I can’t get up and do ‘Harlots,’ and I can’t learn these lines, so I’ll turn up on set and I’ll throw a wobbly.” Back to her big-girl voice: “bollocks.”

Some actors stomp their feet, impatient for their turn to arrive. But Ms. Manville has been quietly waiting for decades for this moment. Finally, with “Phantom Thread,” her face — with her Sphinx-like line of a mouth and lavender crystal-ball eyes — has become an international object of fascination. At the beginning of the film, Lesley-as-Cyril refracts her brother’s gaze into a steely glare, staring down his outgoing girlfriend and sizing up his incoming one, Alma. (“You have the ideal shape,” she tells Alma after assisting Reynolds in taking her measurements. “He likes a little belly.”)

But midway through, Cyril turns her critical eye on Reynolds. When she advises him, between sips from a teacup, “Don’t pick a fight with me, you certainly won’t come out alive,” it lands with an impact that’s since reverberated across the internet, turning Cyril into a kind of cult feminist figure — she’s been hailed as “the new Miranda Priestly” and “a damn hero” — and Ms. Manville with her.

But first, it took some more waiting around. The film’s director, Paul Thomas Anderson, said: “The entire first couple weeks for Lesley were challenging, because she spent so much time dutifully sitting in the corner. Two weeks of sitting there, smiling at your brother, nodding at what a genius he is — it’s exhausting.” During those long first weeks, before Cyril came alive as a force of her own, Mr. Anderson recalled: “I would say to her, ‘Your time is coming.’ And that’s exactly how it worked out.”

MS. MANVILLE WAS RAISED in a little flat in the seaside town of Brighton, the youngest of three daughters to a taxi driver father and homemaker mother. Her parents were part of what she calls the “gin and tonic set” of Brighton’s mod 1960s scene — charming, glamorous and traditional. They “didn’t instill in me any sort of feminist values,” Ms. Manville said. “I grew up thinking the man was the boss of the household, and that a woman was subservient.” Her mother danced ballet but quit when she married. She wore a girdle under her clothes every day, even if she was just at home doing housework. When Ms. Manville wiggled into a similar item to play Cyril, she found that “they’re not the most comfortable of things, but they do make you look great underneath a fitted suit.”

She struck out on her own early to dance and sing at stage school, but took more to acting, and, at 19, logged episodes as a farm girl on the British soap “Emmerdale” to pay for a flat of her own. Soon after, she met Mr. Leigh. In her, he saw “a brilliant character actress stuck just playing herself,” he told me. In his work, which emphasizes naturalistic character-building and improvisation, she saw “a way forward.”

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Ms. Manville grew up in the seaside town of Brighton, striking out on her own early to dance and sing at stage school.CreditAnnie Tritt for The New York Times

She’s since collaborated with Mr. Leigh more than any other actor, and from him she learned to maneuver easily in and out of character, to always have her “Lesley antenna” up even as she’s playing someone else. “You can’t say, ‘Well, I’m just 100 percent Mary.’ I’m sorry, I don’t buy that. You’re not,” she said. “You can’t completely erase your entire life.”

In 1987, Ms. Manville married Gary Oldman, and they split shortly after their son, Alfie, was born. Mr. Oldman went off to become an American movie star, and she raised Alfie on her own. “It makes me anxious and neurotic and hell to live with,” Mr. Oldman has said of his acting process. Not so for Ms. Manville. She departed from her parents’ traditional path, but her mother’s example of how to look after a family stuck. “Even when I was working, I would make sure there was something home-cooked in the fridge,” she said.

Alfie is grown now, but she’s still calibrated to single motherhood. “The problem is that I’ve always done everything, so now I can’t stop doing everything,” she said. “I don’t like being driven — I like to drive. I don’t like people doing my hair. I don’t like people doing my makeup. I’m not good with people doing things for me.” To be clear: “It’s not because I don’t want someone to cook my dinner. It’s that nobody ever really has. So I just cook it myself.”

Taking care of the business of life is an artistic choice as well as a personal one. Many of the details she builds into characters “I’m getting for nothing,” she said. “That’s just what having a life brings you. I have an inherent understanding of someone who’s lost a husband, or someone who isn’t married, or someone who’s lonely.” Or someone who is not lonely at all. For Cyril, who eschews marriage and instead pair-bonds with her brother in the “quiet, anal, hermetic world” of the House of Woodcock, “control is almost a kind of sex,” she said. If she identifies with Cyril, it’s in this way: “I’ve spent a lot of time happily on my own. I’m very sure of who I am.”

IN MS. MANVILLE’S RECENT WORK, a theme has emerged — of women who contend with towering male artists and reveal their shortcomings. There’s “Long Day’s Journey,” of course, in which Mary’s life is constructed (and deconstructed) around her husband, the matinee idol James Tyrone, played here by Jeremy Irons.

“She’s had what looks like a quite glamorous life,” Ms. Manville said of Mary. “I make sure I deliver with great clarity and emotion when she speaks about what her life actually has been like” — following her husband around the country, waiting alone in cheap hotels as he goes out to the theater each day and comes home drunk each night.

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Ms. Manville, seen here in “Another Year,” has collaborated with the filmmaker Mike Leigh more than any other actor, and from him she learned to maneuver easily in and out of character.CreditSimon Mein/Sony Pictures Classics

James speaks of Mary’s love lighting a fire beneath his ambition, but he extinguished hers. She dreamed of being a concert pianist, before she married. Through morphine, she can escape to her memories, to a time, Ms. Manville said, “when she was Mary, instead of just Mrs. Tyrone.”

And then there is “Phantom Thread,” in which Reynolds Woodcock can make beautiful dresses but can’t seem to make his own omelets or dump his own girlfriends. He needs Cyril to supervise both the atelier and his life. In the months leading up to the shoot, Ms. Manville and Mr. Day-Lewis began forging that super-glued sibling codependency over text message. He was preparing for his role by apprenticing in the costume department at the New York City Ballet, and he would update Ms. Manville on his progress: “I’d get a text from him that just said: ‘buttonholes today.’”

There’s something striking about the approaches of these two actors: Mr. Day-Lewis, the method actor, giving over his own life for a year to learn to sew couture, a process that would engulf him in such a depression that he swore he’d never make another film, and the practical Ms. Manville, literally taking care of her own mending between film shoots and O’Neill scenes.

There is an assumption embedded in the figure of the artistic genius — that every faculty must be directed toward the art, leaving life behind. The genius is, of course, a designation rarely extended to women. He’s a man who can create wonderful things but can’t manage himself, so he has women do it for him. Even as she plays such women, Ms. Manville challenges all that: She is the great artist who can take care of herself and everybody else, too.

But while the men of her cohort — Mr. Irons, Mr. Oldman, Mr. Day-Lewis — have become acclaimed as generational talents, recognition of her has remained just out of reach. It’s a little closer now. When she arrived at the Oscars, she was surprised to find that “Steven Spielberg knew who I was,” she said. “Emma Stone knew who I was. Meryl knew who I was.”

Her roles are getting bigger, the openings wider. Next she’s slated to play the cancer-stricken wife to Liam Neeson’s husband in the drama “Normal People” (the first time in recent memory that he’s been paired onscreen with a woman born in the same decade as him) and Gala, Salvador Dalí’s wife and muse (Ben Kingsley will be the genius).

A funny thing happened at the Oscars, actually. “Gary and I, by complete coincidence, arrived at the same time,” she said. “It was really surreal.” For a moment their careers aligned, and then diverged again. Mr. Oldman won his Oscar. Ms. Manville is still waiting — sitting, mending, biding her time — for that.